MovieMartyr.com - Thieves' Highway

To the uninitiated the subject matter of Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway might seem a bit slight. After all, it only focuses on the transport of a few truckloads of apples from the grower’s grove to the greengrocer’s storefront. Despite that apparent specificity, however, Dassin’s film emerges as a rather searing, wide-reaching indictment of the necessary evils of doing business in the United States. Featuring a group of immigrants tussling over the smallest of scores, it demonstrates fundamental, ugly truths about America’s capitalist system. None of the characters in the film are above scheming, backstabbing or strong-arming another to get the money they feel they need here. Even though the script eventually arranges the sins of its cast into a hierarchy of acceptable behaviors, it doesn’t feel it necessary to endlessly moralize about them. Instead, the film feels more awake to the realities of the world than the average noir, because it doesn’t simply recoil from the flaws of people with bitterness: it expects and forgives them. Thieves’ Highway, despite its melodramatic trappings, is a film alive to the complexities of economics. When its inevitable Code-mandated finale rolls, its revelations feel less like a happy ending than the end of an idealist’s naiveté.

The dominance of immigrant characters in Thieves’ Highway makes it feel like the work of an expatriate director (ironically, Dassin would later leave American soil himself), rather than one who was born in the United States. Though the hero, a war veteran (Richard Conte), who comes home healthy only to find his father crippled by the enemy within, is a second-generation American, he might be the only one in the cast that qualifies as such. More typical of the films’ characters is Italian Rica (Valentina Cortesa), a prostitute who seems equally likely to betray and deserve trust. Her exotic, distinctly European character lends a strong erotic charge to the film’s Southern California setting. An actor plays the most clearly defined villain of the piece in a turn that’s just as memorable. Lee J. Cobb, prefacing his most famous role as On the Waterfront’s corrupt union leader, is Mike Figlia, who’s too sensible a businessman to seem truly evil. Though Highway has the crisp shadows of Dassin’s other noir works and as many exceptional action scenes of any of the director’s films, it’s the characters that make the biggest impression this time. Far more potent than the era’s other famed trucker picture, 1940’s They Drive By Night, Thieves’ Highway is one of Dassin’s very best.

Jeremy Heilman

02-11-04